I arrived at
Comdex this year
after visiting my mother and sister in North Carolina. The most
memorable moment on that leg of the journey came when I visited the
CompUSA store in Greensboro. No, it wasn't anything at the store
that excited me. It was the banner hanging from one of the chain
motels by the Interstate: "Free high speed Internet!"

This sign raised a persistent question I took with me to
Comdex: What does it mean for the rest of the world when
they're giving away broadband in North Carolina motels?
Or, more briefly, Will freedom win?

My hotel in Las Vegas was the new
Aladdin, which is
huge and theme-y; they all are now. The room was nice, especially
for the $79/night price. The location was relatively convenient,
next to Paris and
across the street from
Bellagio on
the Strip. It had broadband in the room, though it wasn't free. It
gave you a choice between spending $9.95/day to use the dumb
terminal with embedded Windows or spending $9.95 to jack your
laptop into the Ethernet outlet. The two methods were charged
separately, for some reason.

The Windows terminal didn't work. Both the complicated
instructions and a call to the hotel's tech support folks made it
clear that failure was the norm. The tech support guy advised me to
ignore the box option and jack my laptop into the system. (Which I
was going to do anyway, but I needed to see just how bad this
mother was.)

[Hey, looking for a nice business? Sell dumb and reliable
Linux internet terminals to big hotels in Vegas. Most, I'm told,
don't have them. And new hotels open there all the time. The next
(no kidding) may be the 10,000-room
Moon
Resort & Casino. (Given Nevada's lunar-like landscape,
it kind of makes sense.)]

As I said in my first show
report, this year Comdex was mostly a Microsoft show--a
place where the company and its most compliant hardware OEMs could
showcase the new Tablet PC. But in a larger sense, it also was an
arena where marketing fought markets, where the hares of
intellectual property raced the tortoises of internet protocol,
where those that want to own the world confronted those that want
to make a world that can't be owned.

As in the hare vs. tortoise contest, most of the attention
focused on the showoffs.
Bill
Gates gave the opening keynote on Sunday night;
Carly
Fiorina followed the next morning. Both demonstrated
Microsoft's new Tablet PC. The only other
keynote
attracting much attention was an hour-long attack on "digital
piracy" by Peter Chernin, the President & CEO of News Corp. and
Chairman & CEO of Fox Group. The title of his speech was
"The
Problem with Stealing". Comdex promoted the speech this
way:

In his address, Mr. Chernin will present a
groundbreaking argument: that digital piracy is at least as
damaging to technology businesses and their progress as it is to
the creative companies whose products are being stolen. In a
presentation that incorporates some of Hollywood's leading creative
voices and some of the technology community's most fundamental
concerns, Mr. Chernin will suggest that only by joining forces with
the media industry will IT companies be able to reinvigorate their
businesses and achieve ongoing and profitable growth.

That call to join the Dark Side was substantiated when George
Lucas himself showed up on stage to support Chernin and his
arguments.

The Big Bully Theory holds that by opposing
digital copyright theft, content providers are looking to roll back
the rights and privileges that consumers have come to enjoy and to
overturn the principles of fair use in favor of our own unfair
agenda. We are accused of seeking to scale back the fundamental
freedoms of digital technology: the ability to time-shift by saving
content for later viewing, the ability to space-shift by
transferring content between televisions and computers, and many
other capabilities that digital products and applications make
possible and likeable by so many people worldwide.

The fact is that we have never had any such interest or
agenda.

Subscribers to the Big Bully Theory may be surprised, for
example, to learn that we have no objection to anyone making copies
of televised content, whether aired on free or pay TV, whether
analog or digital, whether recorded on a PVR, a VCR, through TiVo,
or with the help of any other device geared to the viewer's
convenience.

The trumpeters of the Big Bully Theory may also be startled
to learn that we have absolutely no problem with viewers shifting
our content from their television to their PC, from their living
room to their bedroom and to their bathroom and back again, as many
times and ways as they'd like.

First, "shifting" does not necessarily include copying.
Second - and this is what makes my blood boil - he's granting us
permission to shift "our content" where "our" refers to the
entertainment company? It's not their content. When I buy a DVD,
the DVD is mine and I can use it any way I want so long as I'm not
reselling it or broadcasting it. The disk is mine. I can make a
copy for my upstairs TV. I can mold it into a pretty little
ashtray. I can roll it in a tube and sell it to Peter Chernin as a
home colonoscopy kit.

Keep your hands of my property, you goddamn burglar!

That was more or less the tone of the
Great
Debate that followed the keynote. Titled "The Gold Rush for
Intellectual Property: Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley", it lined up
three entertainment industry executives against free software guru
Richard M. Stallman
and John Perry
Barlow, the EFF cofounder and self-described "cognitive
dissident" whose own acquaintance with intellectual property
derives largely from having served as lyricist for the Grateful
Dead.

The topic was hot to begin with, but it was quickly raised
past the boiling point when RMS jumped in. The man would not be
silenced--or even held to the debate's protocols. At one point M.
Scott Dinsdale, the Executive VP of Digital Strategy for the Motion
Picture Association of America (MPAA), turned to Richard (sitting
to his left) and yelled "Will you SHUT UP?" Richard ignored
him.

The moderator, Eric Lundquist, Editor in Chief of
eWeek, opened the debate by giving the first
turn to Richard. He opened by explaining that "intellectual
property" was a deceptive catch-all label that included patent,
copyright and other topics that need to be pulled apart and
discussed on their own terms. He then added that this discussion
was properly isolated to copyright. Over the course of the exchange
that followed, Richard blamed the entertainment industry for overly
narrow interpretations of copyright law, for leading Congress to
expansions of copyright law and for creating a system that fails to
compensate most of the artists it represents--in other words, for
behaving like the controlling entities they have been for many
decades. "For the marketplace to do anything meaningful, it must be
a free market. Not one in which media companies control the
marketplace."

When Ted Cohen, Vice President of Digital Development and
Distribution with EMI, said his company "believes in making music
available at a reasonable price, with reasonable rights for
reasonable use", and that he simply wants to find a way for artists
and record companies to continue making money, Richard came back
with a long rebuttal accusing record companies of cheating both
artists and customers. He also called peer-to-peer sharing of files
a form of "civil disobedience", and he recommended that artists
bypass their industry and deal directly with their own
marketplace.

Jonathan Potter, Executive Director of the Digital Media
Association (DiMA), admitted the industry has not kept pace with
technology. He also seemed to have little regard for the record
industry's preference for attack politics rather than a
constructive approach to intermediating between the "two core
constituencies" in the market, artists and consumers. If the record
companies couldn't help, he said, they should "get out of the
way".

Scott Dinsdale also said he thought the same two
constituencies should find ways to work together, and he stressed
the importance of "choice" by all parties. New technologies
limiting choice, he said, were "wrong and pretentious". He also
said the industry's old distribution system, which sells plastic
discs containing "two songs you like and ten songs you don't"
through retail outlets, was a doomed one.

John Perry Barlow took issue with the term "consumer", which
everybody on the entertainment industry side of the argument
constantly used. He also took issue with the term
content. "I didn't start hearing about
'content' until the container business started going away", he
said.

He also lamented the industry's success at lobbying both
Congress and the largest technology manufacturers to not only
require digital rights management (DRM) but to embed DRM schemes in
future equipment--including PCs and their operating systems. He
said both Intel and Microsoft are already moving ahead with exactly
those plans, with or without regulatory encouragement. "I see them
changing the matrix of the Internet to a model that's based on
surveillance and control. That is in the long term advantage of
those who want to control and surveil." He also expressed some
disappointment that his own originally optimistic views about the
ungovernable nature of cyberspace have failed to prevail against an
industry that's hellbent to regulate it.

Potter and Cohen both tried to offer upbeat scenarios.
Potter, for example, gave the record industry credit for finally
embracing the idea of on-line music
distribution and said he expected the marketplace to sort stuff out
eventually.

RMS wasn't buying it. In one of the heated exchanges that
followed, he called Potter a "troll". He also loudly instructed
Cohen to call Linux by its "proper name". Dinsdale finally ceased
trying to contribute, sandwiched as he was between Barlow and the
irrepressible RMS.

Afterwards I had a brief conversation with John Perry Barlow.
He said one of his biggest concerns was Intel's new LaGrande
technology, which creates a way to embed supply-controlled DRM in
what will likely become more than 90% of the world's computers.
"It's already well underway", he said.

Today I want to introduce a new technology, though, just like
we did last year with Hyper-Threading Technology.

The new technology has to do with safer computing. This
technology is codenamed LaGrande Technology. LaGrande is all about
creating a safer computing environment.

If we are going to enable convergence, if we are going to
enable the promise of e-Business, we have to be able to have a more
secure environment here. Hardware-based strengthening to this is
critical.

LaGrande delivers a hardware-based foundation for security.
It includes protected execution, protected memory, and protected
storage.

It will be delivered into the marketplace through our
processors and our chipsets working together to create a secure
hardware environment.

We are working with the industry to do this, not just our OEM
partners and ISV and OSV partners, but also the privacy experts to
ensure we do it in a way that is acceptable to the norms of privacy
nowadays.

It's a core technology that things like the Microsoft
Palladium initiative can take advantage of to build much more
stable platforms.

In
"Intel
- Another 432?", David Reed, one of the Internet's primary
architects, compared LaGrande to the failed 432 microprocessor. It
tried to embed a software idea--object oriented programming--in
hardware:

OO computing is fundamentally about "late
binding"--which, like my own design principle, the "end-to-end
argument" means avoiding putting too much function in the least
plastic parts of the system. Late-binding enables a system to
evolve rapidly and flexibly. That's what software is good at, and
why OO is inherently a software idea. Putting the evolving ideas of
OO into hardware is the design equivalent of an oxymoron. Wasting
all that specialized and frozen silicon on a specific version of OO
burdened any design with costs and risks that the future would not
play out as planned.

...What will kill LaGrande is the same problem. Building some
specialized notion of content protection into the processor and its
buses is "early binding" in an extreme form. It makes the whole
architecture brittle, and unable to compete for new opportunities,
new applications, etc.

Why is LaGrande's design early binding? Because we don't
know, we really don't know, what sorts of protection make sense in
the emerging digital, networked marketplaces. Despite 35 years of
computer security research, we have not yet increased our
understanding of what needs to be protected beyond a simplified,
very unworkable notion of military document security. Now joined
with a simplified, very unclear notion of what Hollywood might
really need (as defined by its lawyers and lobbyists--not the most
technically savvy designers).

Barlow is no less aware of the pitfalls for efforts like
LaGrande, but he's still rather pessimistic for a basically
optimistic guy. Worse, he suspects the leading companies in our own
industry really aren't on our side either. He told me one of his
(and our) biggest mistakes in recent years has been underestimating
the Net-hostile resolve of the entertainment industry, with its
armies of lawyers and enormous clout. He now believes Congress
won't take technologists seriously until they organize themselves
and "take out" one of Hollywood's elected lackeys in an upcoming
election.

During a panel discussion outside of Comdex, senior
executives from Microsoft Corp. said that the company's Palladium
technology, when finished, will provide a secure hardware and
software platform to begin offering digital rights management on
newly released material.

Microsoft, however, disagreed with the entertainment
industry's focus on enforcing copyrights on insecure material that
has already been released.

"The media industry has been too focused on trying to bring
forward copy protections and apply them to the general environment
of the computer system," said Craig Mundie, senior vice president
and chief technical officer of advanced strategies and policy at
Microsoft.

"Microsoft would rather come together [with the media
industry] around a strategy of rights management than look
backwards at areas of copy protection," Mundie said.

When released, Palladium will complement the industry's
efforts to secure copyright content, enhancing digital rights
protection with hardware-based encryption, according to Mundie.
Microsoft executives didn't say when Palladium will be out, but
said it will be part of a set of features in a future Windows
release.

Addressing the thorny problem of how to ensure that
copyrights are enforced on material that is so broadly distributed
and used, Mundie said that the very nature of music and images
makes it unlikely media companies will ever be free of the issues
of piracy and unlicensed use.

Taking to heart what David Reed says about simplicity and
about limiting complexity in the least elastic parts of the
Network, it seems AMD and Linux will have an advantage in what they
don't include, as well as in what they
do.

There is nothing Intel or Microsoft can do to limit the
market's ability to kick their tires. It's too late for that.
Customers have too much access to information and too much power to
inform each other.

It was interesting to me that Barlow and Stallman were the
only panelists in the Debate who not only had laptops in front of
them on stage but used them as resources in preparing their
responses. They looked, quite simply, far more evolved.

Markets are naturally resourceful. In the long run, freedoms
will outsell restrictions, no matter how embedded those
restrictions may be. But unless we inform and organize our markets
about what Hollywood is up to, that run will be a lot longer than
we'd like.

Who should we target? We need to pick one now, and start campaigning against them. For the politicos to listen up, it has to be made clear that this is an important issue for a cohesive block of voters. The only way to do that is by making it an issue for someone and then following through with the resources necessary to make a difference.

Not sure if I'll be back here for a while, but I'll probably hear about it if the inner circle of digital freedom picks one in unison and shares that info. Info seems to get around this community at the speed of light. :-)

What would AMD leave out ? They were the first to contact Microsoft to provide support for Palladium, so that they could be sure that Microsoft supported AMD's processors. After that Intel could only follow, they showed most resistance first.

Thanks for clearing that up. It probably wasn't regarding anything specific, but I'm still curious. I picture RMS sounding like the Comic Store guy on the Simpsons, saying something along the lines of: "You sir, are a troll. Now get your hands off my copy of Radioactive Man #5!"